Spatiotemporal Partitioning of Transportation Network Using Travel Time Data

Abstract

Today, the deployment of sensing technology permits the collection of massive amounts of spatiotemporal data in urban areas. These data can provide comprehensive traffic state conditions for an urban network and for a particular day. However, data are often too numerous and too detailed to be of direct use, particularly for applications such as delivery tour planning, trip advisors, and dynamic route guidance. A rough estimate of travel times and their variability may be sufficient if the information is available at the full city scale. The concept of the spatiotemporal speed cluster map is a promising avenue for these applications. However, the data preparation for creating these maps is challenging and rarely discussed. In this study, that challenge is addressed by introducing generic methodologies for mapping the data to a geographic information system network, coarsening the network to reduce the network complexity at the city scale, and estimating the speed from the travel time data, including missing data. This methodology is demonstrated on the large-scale urban network of Amsterdam, Netherlands, with real travel time data. The preprocessed data are used to build the spatiotemporal speed cluster by using three partitioning techniques: normalized cut, density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise, and growing neural gas (GNG). A new posttreatment methodology is introduced for density-based spatial clustering and GNG, which are based on data point clustering, to generate connected zones. A preliminary cross comparison of the clustering techniques shows that GNG performs best in generating zones with minimum internal variance, the normalized cut computes three-dimensional zones with the best intercluster dissimilarity, and GNG has the fastest computation time.